“What’s your name?” she asked.
He gave a high-pitched sort of a laugh. “Nosferatu,” he said.
“Of course it is,” she said, and saw him out of the door. Before she went back in the window she counted the money again, and posted her going rate through the hole into the back room. The rest of it she hid in the hollow heel of her shoe. Sometimes they checked. But she was going to risk it.
LOU
Saturday 2 November 2013, 10:25
“Hey. Open your eyes.”
“What time is it?”
“I don’t know. Your phone’s been bleeping.”
Lou sat up, sleep-crumpled and still dazed, wondering how come it was broad daylight. Oh—rest day. She fell back against the pillow.
“Oh, no, you don’t,” Jason said, kissing her neck. “Come on. Rise and shine.”
Lou groaned. “How come you’re so bloody perky? Haven’t you even got the decency to have a hangover?”
“I never get hangovers, you know that.”
“Wait till you get to my age,” Lou said, thinking how unfair it was that she always suffered the next day, even when she’d drunk hardly anything.
“Here we go with the age thing. You want me to make you coffee, Grandma?”
Jason went downstairs and for a moment Lou lay still with her eyes closed. But then her phone bleeped again, and it was too late to pretend the day hadn’t started. She checked the phone and saw the missed calls from her mother, one new voicemail and two emails. It could all wait ten more minutes. She went to the bathroom and had a shower, washing her tangled hair under the warm spray and thinking about what Jason had said last night. It had been a long, long time since anyone had told her they loved her. It felt good.
By the time she emerged, wrapped in a towel, hair hanging in damp strands around her shoulders, there was a mug of black coffee next to the bed and the landline was ringing.
“Hi, Mum,” she said.
“How did you know it was me?” her mother asked.
Caller display, thought Lou. “You’re the only person who rings me this early on my day off. How are you?”
“I’m fine, darling. I tried your mobile earlier; I left you a message. Just wondered if you’d had a chance to talk to Tracy.”
“Not yet. I was going to call her later.”
“Oh?”
“Well, I might as well tell you. I’ve managed to find someone to bring to the wedding. His name is Jason. Go easy on him, all right?”
There was an audible breath on the other end of the phone. “Really? Oh, how lovely! What do you mean, go easy on him? What do you think we’re going to do?”
Scare him off?
“It’s nothing serious, Mum, don’t get your hopes up.”
At that moment Jason himself appeared, standing in the doorway. Mug in hand, wearing jeans and nothing else. He looked gorgeous. Louisa smiled at him.
“Oh. Who is he? Not someone from work, is it?”
Louisa gritted her teeth at that. Where else was she supposed to meet people? And besides, what was wrong with dating a fellow officer? It wasn’t as if she was selecting her future life partner from the cells, was it? “Look, you’ll get to meet him soon, all right? Unless something comes up and I can’t make it.”
“Oh, Louisa.”
Jason put his mug down on the chest of drawers and carried on getting dressed. He sat on the end of the bed, pulling his socks on.
“How are you, anyway? How’s Dad?”
“Oh, he’s okay, do you want to speak to him?”
“Not especially . . .”
But her mother had already put down the phone and was wandering through the house calling, “Roger? Roger! Louisa wants to talk to you!”
Lou stretched out a hand and placed it on Jason’s back. He didn’t move for a minute, then he got up, retrieved his mug and took it downstairs.
“I don’t know where he’s buggered off to,” Lou’s mother said eventually, coming back to the phone. “Typical.”
“It doesn’t matter—just give him my love, okay?”
A few minutes later Lou was dressed and downstairs. Jason was in the living room, putting on his trainers. “Hey,” she said. “Are you going somewhere?”
He didn’t answer at first, just finished what he was doing and stood up.
“What is it?” Lou asked. “What’s wrong?”
He looked so lost, so sad, that for a moment Lou thought something terrible had happened. Then he shook his head, smiled at her and kissed her cheek, his hand on her upper arm.
“I’ve got stuff to do today,” he said. “I might catch up with you later.”
“Jason?”
But he was already retrieving his wallet and his phone from the table, and then he was gone.
Date: 2 November 2013
To: DCI Lou SMITH
From: DC Jane PHELPS
Re: Nigel MAITLAND DOB 17/12/1958
Ma’am,
As discussed, I visited Hermitage Farm yesterday afternoon to return some unused property to the MAITLANDs. The only person at the premises was Connor PETRIE, who informed me that Nigel and Felicity MAITLAND have gone away. He did not seem to know where they had gone, or when they would be back. He said he had been left in charge. When I got back to the office I put in a call to Flora MAITLAND. She said her parents had gone on a last-minute holiday to Madeira. She thinks they will be back on the fifteenth.
SAM
Saturday 2 November 2013, 10:45
Caro had already retrieved a job car when Sam found her in the car park behind Headquarters. Caro’s rear end was reversing out of the back seat.
“Oh, morning,” Caro said cheerfully. “Just clearing up a bit. Want me to drive?”
“You know where we’re going.”
Caro deposited a supermarket carrier bag full of rubbish from the back of the car into one of the skips and they both got in. Despite the clean-up there was a lingering smell in the car, something between damp trainers, cherry air-freshener and fried food. Sam opened her window a crack as Caro swiped her security pass at the exit barrier.
“The McDonnells live out near Catswood,” Caro began. “Lewis and his girlfriend, I mean. They have offices in the town but I’m guessing they won’t be there on a Saturday, so catching them at home is the best idea.”
“I’ve never met either of the McDonnell brothers,” Sam said. “What are they like?”
“Perfectly pleasant, unless you’ve got something on them.”
“You’ve dealt with them a lot?”
“Only since I moved here. They’re among Special Branch’s favorite targets, thanks to the trafficking.”
“And our plan for today?”
“Well,” Caro said, turning onto the main road out of town, “at our briefing this morning it turns out that Lewis McDonnell’s company, or one of them at least, owns Carisbrooke Court. We’ve been trying to nail that link ever since the warrant. Needless to say, the businesses involved have been tricky to unravel. The short version is that the building used to be owned by KJK Enterprises, which is a management lettings company that also owns a beauty salon in King Street managed by Kimberly Kerber, none other than Lewis McDonnell’s girlfriend. But quite recently—a couple of months ago—ownership transferred to GEMA Holdings, which has offices in Spain and Leeds. And that business has got links to Golden Eagle Associates Ltd, which is McDonnell’s property management company, based right here in Briarstone. Follow all that?”
“I thought we already knew he had links to the location?”
“Just the intel. And that was pretty sketchy.”
The car sped through the narrow lanes toward Catswood, passing farms and hamlets grouped around a church or a pub. It had rained earlier but now the sun was shining, making the wet road ahead gleam so brightly it was hard to look at. A few minutes later Caro pulled off the main road into a driveway, flanked by curved brick walls that ended abruptly in an imposing wooden gate. Caro got out to press the button on the
intercom. From the top of the wall, a security camera watched their every move.
To Sam’s surprise, the wooden gates started to swing soundlessly open. Caro got back in the car and drove through.
“Apparently Lewis isn’t home,” she said. “But Kim said she’d be more than happy to welcome us into her charming country kitchen.”
They parked in front of a modern brick-built house that was made vastly more attractive by the sunshine and the two oversized stone lions that guarded the front door. As soon as they got out of the car, the door opened and three small dogs skittered out, yapping and jumping up.
“Get in here! I said get in!” a dark-haired woman was yelling.
Sam was hopeful she was talking to the dogs, which completely ignored her until she stopped yelling, and then sauntered back inside one by one.
“Kim,” Caro said. “Thanks for seeing us. I’m DC Caro Sumner; this is my colleague, DS Sam Hollands.”
“You can come in if you like. I told you, though, he ain’t here.”
Sam and Caro followed Kim into a large hallway with a polished slate floor. Sam glanced through a wide arch to a sitting room with cream carpets—great idea, with dogs, she thought—to plate-glass windows at the back. A little glimpse of garden, bordered by a thick hedge, and what looked like some serious building work going on out there. Mini-diggers abandoned, piles of bricks on pallets, big rolls of plastic sheeting.
They continued through to a vast modern kitchen that looked as if it rarely got used for anything more elaborate than toast and cornflakes, both of which were in evidence on the breakfast bar. Kim Kerber was wearing a biscuit-colored tracksuit with some motif on the chest that Sam thought was probably something designer. She had long, dark hair extensions, eyelash extensions and a shiny French manicure. They’d obviously caught her just as she was about to begin her morning makeup routine, as what looked like a chrome toolbox was scissored open on the large stripped pine table, spewing its brightly colored contents.
“Having some work done?” Sam asked.
“Eh?”
“Outside. Looks like you’re getting an extension built or something. Must be a pain.”
“Oh, that. No, we’re having a pool put in. Takes ages, digging. Have a seat,” she said, waving vaguely at the chairs.
“Thanks,” Caro said. “So where did you say Lewis has gone?”
“I didn’t say,” Kim murmured, fingering a tube of something that looked like oil paint. “He’s probs at the office.”
“On a Saturday?”
“My day off, innit. It’s either the office or golf. What you want him for, anyway?”
“We wanted to ask about a property in Carisbrooke Court. It used to be owned by KJK, which is your business, isn’t it?”
Kim looked wary all of a sudden, then laughed. “My business? You’re having a laugh.”
“You’re the registered owner.”
“Yeah, right. He puts stuff in my name all the time. Anyway, you said it used to be owned by KJK. So it isn’t anymore, right? Not my problem.”
“I understood that you and Lewis are partners, Kim. You do help out with the property management side of it, don’t you?”
On the table, Kim’s smartphone buzzed. She looked at it, smiled, and began to reply to the text with the pads of her fingers. Sam thought she wasn’t going to bother answering their question, but a moment later she dropped the phone again, looked Caro in the eye and said, “I do the interior design. I sort out the decorators and go to Asda and IKEA to buy all the furniture, cushions and shit. I tart the places up before he gets tenants in, or before he sells them on. That’s it.”
“You don’t help with the tenants? Take calls from them, stuff like that?”
“Do I bollocks.”
“So who looks after the properties once the tenants are inside?” Sam asked.
“I don’t fucking know, honestly. Go and speak to the organ grinder. You want to know something about foils or straighteners, I can help. The rest of it, you need to see Lewis.”
Back in the car, Sam took a deep breath in. “That went well.”
“Better than I expected,” Caro said cheerfully. “She usually doesn’t let us in when he’s not there. You saw all the stuff out in the back garden?”
“What, the building work?”
“They bury stuff. That’s what the digger’s for. They’ve been ‘having a pool put in’ for the last four years.”
“Bury stuff? You mean drugs?”
Caro gave Sam a cheerful grin. “Drugs, guns, people. Whatever they want to hide. Rumor has it Mr. McDonnell has two or three whole shipping containers somewhere in the back garden that he uses to teach people how to keep their mouths shut. That’s how he does it. Dig a nice big hole and pretend it’s going to be a swimming pool.”
SCARLETT
Tuesday 25 September 2012, 21:19
Despite the alcohol wipe, the wound on Scarlett’s shoulder became infected. Eating crap food and barely sleeping meant she was susceptible to infections in any case, but this one hit her particularly badly. She was running a fever and on the verge of hallucinating when they pulled her out of the room early—replacing her with a girl she’d never seen before, or maybe she had, it was impossible to tell—and two of them took her to the clinic.
It wasn’t a clinic by any normal definition of the word, but Scarlett knew she was lucky to be taken there. It consisted of two rooms—a waiting room and a treatment room—behind a fast food shop in Bijlmer, twenty minutes out of the city. The doctor was a Russian, who spoke Dutch and no more than a few words of English, and she had seen him before, once, when she’d needed stitches after a customer had cut her head open with his signet ring. They didn’t always take the women for medical treatment. It had to be bad, and you had to be worth the money to be taken there. And there was a cost involved, because of course this wasn’t an official clinic; although she had heard that the Dutch helpfully provided medical assistance and treatment to prostitutes, they couldn’t have her interacting with anyone official.
So they paid the Russian on her behalf, and the money came out of her fictitious wages, added to the debt she owed them for her board and lodging, clothing, condoms, protection, the drugs she didn’t use . . . the debt that got larger every day.
She waited in the first room with one of them. The other one waited outside in the car, partly because there wasn’t room for two thugs in the tiny, stifling room, partly to protect the car and watch the door in case Scarlett decided to run for it.
She felt too wretched to run, in any case.
The doctor, who was dressed in jeans that slung low on his hips under a belly, and a shirt with yellow stains under the armpits, did not touch her. She was glad. He gave the antibiotics to her companion and muttered a few words in Russian.
“You keep clean,” he said to her, by way of a translation.
Scarlett nodded.
As they walked back through the waiting room, Scarlett saw the next woman waiting for attention with her minder. She was a girl, young, with bruises coloring her left eye and nose. She was visibly shaking, and Scarlett wondered what was wrong with her. She raised her head and Scarlett met her eyes. There was a brief connection between them. Nothing was said. Scarlett smiled at her, trying to give her some encouragement.
It will be okay. This isn’t the worst thing you’re going to have to face. It will get better.
Two lies, sandwiching a truth.
SAM
Saturday 2 November 2013, 11:25
Lewis McDonnell’s business premises were on the ground floor of a former printworks in the town center. Other offices surrounded a courtyard that doubled as a haphazard car park, full of signs promising imminent clamping and towing at vast expense to the unwary.
All the way across town, Sam had been thinking of the digging equipment in the back garden of McDonnell’s house, and what it was for. She had worked on a job once, years ago when she’d been with the Met. A piece of land behind an indu
strial complex was being redeveloped; the excavators had hit something metal, uncovered the doors of what looked like a whole shipping container buried at an almost vertical angle. The doors, at ground level, were covered over with rubble, rubbish and overgrown with brambles. The construction workers had managed to force open the door and then had shut it again quickly and called the police. Sam had been right there when they’d opened it all up again. Three bodies at the bottom of the container, badly decomposed. When the pathologist had finally worked through the remains she had reported that the three individuals—two adult men, and a young woman—had been left in there at separate times, probably years apart. The woman had been the last. It was impossible to tell if any of them had been alive when they’d gone in, but marks on the steep inside slope of the container suggested that at least one of them had made several attempts to climb their way out.
At the point when Sam had moved to Eden the case had remained unsolved, the bodies unidentified.
McDonnell himself welcomed them in, offering them a seat and a coffee to go with it. He was shorter than Sam and stocky, with gelled, silver hair cut short on a square head, intelligent blue eyes, and a smile which showed his teeth.
“Kim told me you might stop by,” he called from the small kitchen. The sound of a kettle could be heard, rumbling to a boil. “You were lucky to catch me.”
“Do you usually work weekends?” Sam asked.
“You can’t keep regular hours when you own your own business,” McDonnell said. “You know how it is.”
Aside from the kitchen, the office was open plan—two big desks covered in piles of paper, boxes and computer equipment, and a little coffee table with three easy chairs under the window.
“Now,” he said, bringing through a tray with three small mugs and some sachets of sugar on it, “what can I do for you?”